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Cancer claims pacifist Daniel Berrigan

Daniel Lewis, New York Times
Saturday, December 7, 2002

Philip Berrigan, the former Roman Catholic priest who led the draft board raids that galvanized opposition to the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, died Friday night in Baltimore after a lifetime of battling "the American Empire," as he called it, over the morality of its military and social policies. He was 79.

His family said the cause was liver and kidney cancer.

An Army combat veteran sickened by the killing in World War II, Berrigan came to be one of the most radical pacifists of the 20th century -- and, for a time in the Vietnam period, a larger-than-life figure in the convulsive struggle over the country's direction.

In the late '60s, he was a Catholic priest serving a poor black parish in Baltimore and seeing nothing that would change his conviction that war, racism and poverty were inseparable strands of a corrupt economic system.

His Josephite superiors had previously hustled him out of Newburgh, N.Y., for aggressive civil rights and anti-war activity there; the "fatal blow," he said, had been a talk to a community affairs council in which he asked, "Is it possible for us to be vicious, brutal, immoral and violent at home and be fair,

judicious, beneficent and idealistic abroad?"

He hardly missed a beat after his transfer to Baltimore, founding an anti- war group, Peace Mission, whose operations included picketing the homes of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk in December 1966.

By the fall of 1967, Berrigan and three friends were ready to try a new tactic. On Oct. 17, they walked into the Baltimore Customs House, distracted the draft board clerks and methodically spattered Selective Service records with a red liquid made partly from their own blood.

Three decades later, Berrigan remembered feeling "exalted" as the judge sentenced him to six years in prison. From then on, he would be in and out of jail for repeated efforts to interfere with government operations and deface military hardware.

Even before his sentencing for the Customs House raid, Berrigan instigated a second invasion, against the local draft board office in Catonsville, Md. Among those persuaded to join was his older brother, the Rev. Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest and poet, who had been one of the first prominent clergymen to preach and organize against the war.

The "Catonsville Nine" struck on May 17, 1968, taking hundreds of files relating to potential draftees from the second floor of the Knights of Columbus building, where the draft board rented space. They piled the documents in the parking lot and set them burning with a mixture of gasoline and soap chips -- homemade napalm.

With so many marches and campus protests going on across the country, it would have been impossible to quantify the effect of a single event on public opinion. What can be said about the Catonsville raid is that it inspired others in New York City, Milwaukee, Boston, Chicago and other cities, the tactic becoming a sort of calling card of the "ultraresistance."

It also elevated the Berrigan brothers to the status of superstars. The two were on the cover of Time magazine and illuminated in profiles by the smartest writers.

But many Americans saw them as traitors, or at best naive dupes of the Viet Cong.

Berrigan had lived at Jonah House, a communal living facility of war resisters, for much of the past decade.

In a final statement released by his family, he said, "I die with the conviction, held since 1968 and Catonsville, that nuclear weapons are the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family and the Earth itself."

Chronicle news services contributed to this report.

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12/07/2002 - Anti-war activist Philip Berrigan dies after battle with cancer .

12/07/2002 - AP News in Brief .

12/06/2002 - Anti-war activist Philip Berrigan dies after battle with cancer .

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